Cake 64

I recently bought a new motherboard/CPU for the computer that was generating the opening book database for Cake. My new machine is the most powerful I ever had, with a Core Quad and 4 GB of RAM. For curiosity's sake, I also installed Windows Vista on that machine. I'm not at all convinced by Microsoft's new OS, but at least it gives me the opportunity to finally run my 64-bit compiles myself. Thanks to this, I found the bug in the 64-bit version of Cake, and of course it was a 32/64-bit issue. I was computing the size of a memory block full of pointers for the endgame database with


char *pointer;
int memsize = blocknum * sizeof(int);
pointer = malloc(memsize);


since I had assumed that sizeof(int) would change to 8 byte on the 64-bit machine. But it stayed at 4 bytes, while pointers do need 8 bytes, and of course the whole thing crashed. I replaced the sizeof(int) with sizeof(pointer) and now it works. It appears that this was the only portability issue; I now have a working 64-bit version of Cake on my machine. By a strange coincidence I clocked it to be 6.4% faster than the 32-bit version.